Cookbook: River Cafe 30

For thirty years, the iconic River Cafe in London has been one of the best Italian restaurants in the world. To celebrate, they are releasing the anniversary cookbook River Cafe 30: at the beginning of March, a collection of the ninety tastiest dishes from the past and thirty new, modern, simple Italian recipes.

Any cooking enthusiast and fan of Italian cuisine has one or more on their shelves. And the titles don’t really matter. When you say you have the blue, green or orange one at home, there’s a good chance that your culinary fellow foodies know exactly what you’re talking about: the cookbooks of London’s River Cafe, the place where, among others, Hugh Fearnly-Whittingstall, April Bloomfield and Jamie Oliver started out in the kitchen as young chefs.

No compromises

What began in 1987 as a company canteen for employees of nearby businesses grew in the 1990s into an iconic Michelin-starred restaurant, attracting people from all over the world for the best that Italian cuisine has to offer. Not bad for a place on the River Thames in London.

The secret? They use only the very, very best ingredients and steer clear of fuss. Low brow dishes made with high brow ingredients. They don’t compromise. Because, as founding ladies Rose Gray (who died in 2010) and Ruth Rodgers believe, you can only eat really well if you have the very best ingredients at home. So what do you do? You import everything from Italy, including the seeds to grow high-quality vegetables in your own garden and greenhouse – just as you’re used to in Italy.

‘The secret? Low brow dishes made with high brow ingredients’

River Cafe 30

By now, the River Cafe is four times as large, employs more than a hundred people and – a small detail – has a fluorescent pink wood-fired oven in the middle of the restaurant. Its repertoire of iconic dishes has also grown enormously. In River Cafe 30, you’ll find ninety classics and thirty new recipes that you can all, yes really, all make successfully at home. The search for the right ingredients is more complicated than the recipes themselves. You really can’t make that ricotta al forno with the blue tub from the supermarket…

So make a shopping list for your next trip to Italy, consult Google for the best Italian speciality shops near you and dig over a square metre of soil in the garden for your own mini vegetable patch. Because it takes some effort, but it’s absolutely worth it.

Title: River Cafe 30 
Author: Ruth Rodgers
Publisher: Kosmos Publishers
Price: €29,99